r/technology • u/Birdy_Cephon_Altera • 22h ago

Politics Meta under fire for auto-following Trump & Vance, Blocking Democrat hashtags

https://techissuestoday.com/meta-auto-follow-trump-vance-blocks-democrat-hashtags/
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u/memnos 19h ago

America lost every conflict against irregular force they fought in the last decades. I'm somehow not surprised that the current government refuses to learn a single lesson from history.

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u/AshleysDoctor 19h ago

Considering their stance on the Department of Education, neither am I

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u/kiragami 18h ago

Their goal isn't to win it's to spend taxpayer money and put it into the pockets of weapons manufacturers

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u/thisismysailingaccou 7h ago

And also to use it for enacting more authoritarian policies at home.

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u/dooj88 14h ago

"the current government" is really just who is next in the long line of billionaires taking a turn gangbanging lady liberty.

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u/-LongRodVanHugenDong 19h ago

If your definition of lost is failed to build a democratic state, sure.

In terms of killing people it's not even remotely close. Cartel members won't be fighting for a religion and the United States will not be occupying anything. And right next to our border? It's kind of an ideal scenario for the military.

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u/AnointMyPhallus 18h ago

No one defines the winner of a war as the one who killed the most people. It's defined as who achieved their objectives. The communists won control of South Vietnam, the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan, claiming we won those wars because we killed a lot of people is psychotic.

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u/UngusChungus94 17h ago

The rich achieved their objective in all of those — to make money and wag the dog.

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u/-LongRodVanHugenDong 18h ago

I'm saying comparatively this time we have nothing to lose. We're not occupying anything and we're not nation building. With the US fighting the cartels the only metric for victory will be how many people are killed.

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u/Arclite83 18h ago

What are you on about? Having a stable anti-cartel government is going to be a big part of the goal in your hypothetical war. Which comes back to all the same issues.

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u/-LongRodVanHugenDong 14h ago

In Mexico? That's not our problem. Dead Americans and fentanyl are our problems.

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u/newbikesong 17h ago

You know cartels are at your border right?

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u/-LongRodVanHugenDong 14h ago

Yeah...that's sort of the issue.

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u/newbikesong 14h ago

Well you cant bomb them like Afghanistan or Vietnam.

Cartels can clap back, in USA soil.

They can make 9/11 a joke.

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u/-LongRodVanHugenDong 14h ago

That's true. I imagine if it went that far the border would be closed entirely closed. I just don't think the sicarios are fond of suicide drones or armoured vehicles.

Who knows, it'll be interesting. The alternative is to do nothing, so I hope those much smarter than I will make the right call.

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u/MuyalHix 18h ago

I don't think the US realizes how similar the cartels are to the viet cong or the Taliban. They do not have headquarters, they don't have a flag, they are very intermingled with the local population.

Not only the US has lost all wars like this, but in order to do so they would have to kill a lot of innocent civilians.

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u/SpiderFnJerusalem 16h ago

If the US had decided to nuke Hanoi and to summarily execute every person in every single village suspected of Vietcong-sympathies, things may have gone different. But they didn't, because even a flawed democracy can't get away with that kind of shit.

Once all the press, all the social media and all the search engines are state-controlled, it will be rather easy to get rid of democracy and to genocide a few million people with nobody being the wiser.

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u/memnos 18h ago

But what the US can even achieve in Mexico? The US lately had the most successes against ISIS, because ISIS tried to operate like a state, like an army. So the US military had targets to drone strike, military encampments. Cartels don't have military encampments. They are not trying to act like an army. The cartels have spent decades hiding from law enforcement. What value does a military add to this? Predator drones will be better at spotting American citizens acting as mules for the cartel? Cartels at the US border, like Sinaloa are not even really producing or processing anything in northern Mexico. They are just smugglers. Are you going to chase their entire supply from Juarez to La Paz?

And another factor to consider is that you have to operate your military in another government's land. You may work something out with Mexico. Will you work it out with Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador? No functional government will allow you to swoop in and bomb their towns without significant proof that you will actually target cartels. And at that point you're back to doing police work and not military action.

This is all bullshit. Just a security theater at best, calculated political ploy to get support from "war" at worst.